I don't know why people are caring so much about how much money she made or anything beside the content of the video.
She touches a topic that is out there: women want a different role on the media.

Women are free to have a different role in the media. Nothing is stopping anyone from doing what they are saying.

If they so badly want a female protagonist or antagonist no-one is stopping them. What she wants is others to cater around to her tastes, which is fine that's what everyone wants, but to wrap it up in 'feminist' issues is dubious at best. Not to mention there are games with female protagonists already and if she did her research she would have found them.

She basically pointed out that women are used as a motivator for stories, yes everyone knows this. Why is this bad and/or sexist? THAT is what she failed to deliver IMO.

I've seen so much better analysis for free.

I still don't get this whole "for free" crap.

She made a halfway decent kickstarter pitch, managed to grab some media attention to fuel her funding, and produced what may be a mediocre result.

How is that different from every other bloody kickstarter? If anything, it's a flaw in kickstarter's business model, not hers.

I don't know why people are caring so much about how much money she made or anything beside the content of the video.
She touches a topic that is out there: women want a different role on the media.

Women are free to have a different role in the media. Nothing is stopping anyone from doing what they are saying.

If they so badly want a female protagonist or antagonist no-one is stopping them. What she wants is others to cater around to her tastes, which is fine that's what everyone wants, but to wrap it up in 'feminist' issues is dubious at best. Not to mention there are games with female protagonists already and if she did her research she would have found them.

She basically pointed out that women are used as a motivator for stories, yes everyone knows this. Why is this bad and/or sexist? THAT is what she failed to deliver IMO.

This is my biggest criticism of the video, though maybe it's addressed in later entries in the series: that her point is unclear.

I don't think she's complaining that there are no female protagonists/antagonists in video games, nor that there are overt forces preventing better female characters. Her complaint is that a female character in a video game tends to be relegated to a particular role, and that role is one of powerlessness and inaction until a male character comes along to save her. Even in games where there are "stronger" female characters they tend to be the player's assistants at best. Pointing out that this isn't the case 100% of the time isn't all that meaningful if it turns out to be the case, say, 95% of the time. Usually the point of an inquiry like this video is to examine if and how the trope is manifested in representative works and then think about how the trope may influence or be influenced by other media.

My biggest criticism of her thesis is that I think she is trying to use a historically pervasive dramatic trope in a particularly constrained medium and then single that medium out. Video games are different from books and movies because the player can interact with things. Certainly early in their history video games were far more popular with boys than girls, and the games reflected that. But were video games different in their gender representations than movies or books or TV produced at the same time? are they today? These are more interesting questions to me, and can still be investigated from a feminist perspective, but at least they reflect that video games have never been produced in a cultural vacuum; certainly no moreso than anything else ever has been.

More generally, all non-player characters are servants to the player's experience-- I would be unhappy in any game if an NPC had a bigger role in resolving the plot than me regardless of its gender. You could say the same about a player character as well given that he or she is distinct from the player. That makes it really really easy to cast any video game character in a feministically unfriendly way: if the player character is a woman, does that mean that she's just a puppet for her a player, statistically likely to be male? If the archvillain of a game is a woman, does that mean that the player is out to destroy a powerful woman? Certainly these arguments, and limitless others, could be made. That doesn't mean that they're right, just that they can be analytically valid.

I would have preferred other investigations than the ones that she presented, like the controversy over Lara Croft's origin story in the latest Tomb Raider game, or a look into gender or exclusions in games more broadly, or at least effort to break games out by time period and compared with contemporaneous cultural norms. I think that the specific evidence she chose and the questions she framed really undermine the quality and relevance of her analysis. It's not that I think it's invalid, I just think that the video is somewhat off target and doesn't do enough to really contribute to the topic.

If you would like to make a thread to discuss another kickstarter that is well known and produced a mediocre result I would be happy to say the same thing about it, presuming I agreed.

But that's not actually what you said. You said that 'someone else' could do better on their own dime - which quite apart from being an empty tautology, implies that people shouldn't ask for money ever.

And that bothers me, because it just flies in the face of the entire purpose of kickstarter: enabling creativity and entrepreneurship. Why should anyone get a pass for using kickstarter to fund their project? I'm sure Subset Games could have lived on ramen instead, and I'm sure Plotkin could have kept his day job and written at night...

You know, I saw Anita's kickstarter during the whole controversy, and despite feeling bad for her about the number of males being colossal dicks to her over the internet, I didn't fund her kickstarter. Why? Because her pitch didn't convince me that she could produce a decent product. And I back a lot of kickstarters - anyone who feels they got 'burnt' in the deal has only themselves to blame for not recognising an amateur when they see one.

That said I agree with her general idea, DID is a boring and overdone basis for a plot and its probably so common because of patriarchal values.

A plot they stopped following 25 years ago ... SOMETHING MUST BE DONE, I NEED MONIEZ!!!

We need to be different, and as long as those differences add up to the same overall value—which they do—then why all the fuss?

I would like to see some justification for this claim, please. On the face of it, it makes no sense to me.

I think it is fairly obvious. Would you prefer that we are all exactly the same?

Being different keep things interesting. But I know that keeping a mix in things is much more important to me than it is to most others.


L. Spiro

Wow.

I seriously can't believe that on a forum that's supposedly populated by intelligent developers I'm seeing such pathetic defensive posts.

Her points are entirely valid. For any triple A game you can name where we have a strong female lead, I can name TEN where they are damsels or male titilation as leads.

I don't think there would be much disagreement that "save the princess" is lazy and overdone. But so is "zombie apocalypse" and "legendary hero" and "super marine who can save humanity" and "small time criminal working his way up the crime chain".

But the same way "save the princess" is contorted into sexism, I could contort "zombie apocalypse" as Christian bashing, "legendary hero" as racism and "small time criminal" as anti-capitalist. It's really just simplistic and lazy.

hmm...

only a rough and tough legendary hero space marine can save humanity, by concealing his marine nature, to work his way up the crime chain, forming and breaking alliances as he goes, on his quest to rescue his love-interest, a space princess, from the evil overlord crime-boss, who makes a business of bringing in criminals and heroes from across time and space to battle each other, and the hoards of the undead, in large-scale competitions and arena battles (involving melee, gunfire combat, racing combat, ...) watched from around the universe.

queue dramatic intro scene:
hero is coming home after a day doing marine stuff, only to find his love interest being abducted, him being stopped from rescuing her by a crowd of undead, as sparkly teleport effects slowly cause her to disappear, as she calls out the protagonists name, ... because the overlord saw her and was awestruck by her prettiness, ...

the overlord can be himself large and towering and overly masculine with an almost ape-like appearance and a large mustache and a massively over-sized cigar (around the of a normal person's arm), who takes everything over-serious and is uncompromising, and served by dim-witted yes-men wearing snazzy uniforms. maybe he also does lots of long range meetings and conferences over a giant TV / viewscreen, ...

maybe the hero can be aided along his quest via an insider, a mysterious black guy with psychic powers (and ninjitsu), an afro, and who talks in Jive ("hey, this cool cat know what be going on, man...").
maybe also a spunky sharp-witted teenage schoolgirl, with skills in one-liners and hacking (and can summon-up high-tech weaponry).
...

...

yep, totally original...